How much is enough stress testing to know system is stable?

[Yamirai]

Hello, i have overclocked my 3 years old PC with GA X58A-UD3R, 1066MHz RAM and 550W PSU with i7 930 to 3.8GHz, this is my first time overclocking, i have made the adjustments to uncore and qpi. Core voltage is at 1.23... It is a D0 revision processor... i had it yesterday at 3.74Ghz without HT at 1.21 and ran intel burn test for 50 cycles, it passed (note that i have a 32 bit win7 with 4 gigs of ram (6 gigs by hardware, 32 bit os wont use more than 4) , so i cant use maximum for testing, it is also a free version , i can only use 1500MB for testing, or standard) i also ran Prime95 for 8 hours at max heat and power comsuption, no errors... Today i clocked it to 3.8 with HT enabled and as i said, core volts at 1.23v, clocked my ram from 1066 to 1448 with 9 9 9 25 timings and 1.6 volts, BCLK 181, X21 multi, 3077 UNcore, 6516 QPI, it has been under normal usage and ran some benchmarks like passmark, cinebench etc, no errors, i also ran IBT for 25 cycles and it passed, (temps are fine, 81c max on one core, others were 79-80, im not gonna get these temps in real life usage anyways, right?) my question is, is it possible to have my system stable at these specs? How many passes should i do with IBT with 1500MB of memory to know my system is stable? How many hours of Prime95? Wherever i look i find different advice for stability testing and opinions on which is better prime or IBT so i thought id ask here... And pls, dont be hard on me, it wasnt me who assembled this PC (even i know 32 bit OS and 6 gigs of ram dont go hand to hand ) and like i said, first time overclocking...

 

[lp231]

Different users have different criteria for when a system is consider as stable. Some will test for 1 hour while others may test for the whole night.
If you felt like that system is stable, then use the computer like you would normally do and see what it does.

 

[Umzipumzi]

I personally do not believe in stress testing. Just because the system is unstable at impossible loads (meaning that you can't really recreate those situations) does not mean that you should tone the OC down or have to increase temps by pushing more volts through the CPU. But if you are seeing instability under normal-mid high loads, then you might want to consider some tuning. Why is the RAM at that voltage?

 

[Yamirai]

ive increased the ram volts cuz its oc'd, the way i understood it is, it doesnt matter how much u overclock to, what matters is the ratio between MHz in OC and volt increase, i mean, a ram thats stock 1066 needs same volts at 1448 like the 1600 stock at lets say 2000 right?

 

[schmuckley]

3 runs of IBT + 2 runs of Hyper-Pi 32m.

 

[Umzipumzi]

Yeah. I was just wondering because I run 1600 at 1.5.